US objects to China-Pakistan nuclear deal

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

This makes a strong possibility that nuclear material from the new reactors could alos be 'shared' or used for 'bomb'..

You should read the posts in the existing Nuclear Deal threads instead of continuing to repeat this canard.

From what is known, the two proposed plants at Chashma will be Light Water NPP's and therefore will not produce Plutonium as a byproduct which can be used in nuclear weapons.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Deal with China on nuclear reactors inked in 2009: Pak​

Pakistan : Amid concerns expressed by India and the US about the new Sino-Pak nuclear deal, Pakistan has claimed that the agreement to build two atomic reactors was inked in 2009 itself during President Asif Ali Zardari’s visit in Beijing, though China notified NSG about it only last month.

A spokesperson for Zardari, who is currently again on a six-day visit to China, said Beijing has demonstrated yet again its strong support to Islamabad by categorically reiterating that it will go ahead with the construction of the two nuclear reactors.

An agreement which “goes along well with the international non-proliferation obligations of China and Pakistan” was signed during Zardari’s last year visit in Beijing, the President’s press secretary Farhatullah Babar said.

His remarks came as Pakistan’s Ambassador to China, Masood Khan, said the issues relating to nuclear plants would certainly be on the agenda of Zardari’s talks with the Chinese leaders.

“Our cooperation is transparent and will be under the IAEA safeguard,” Khan said.

The news about China’s plans to build nuclear reactors for Pakistan was first carried by ‘China National Nuclear Corporation’ on its website in March this year.

China notified the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) about its plan in this regard last month.

On his arrival in Beijing on Tuesday, Zardari said “we believe that China is a factor of stability in the region.”

“This is my fifth visit to China since October 2008 and I have truly been inspired by the remarkable achievements of the Chinese people,” he said.

Strengthening of cooperation with China is one of the key principles guiding Pakistan’s foreign policy, he said, adding that his visit is aimed at pushing forward the process of strategic engagement, enhancing economic and trade ties and bolstering people-to-people contacts to lend greater depth and a newer perspective to the bilateral relations.

India and the United States have already conveyed their concerns to China over the Sino-Pak nuclear deal.

National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, who held extensive talks with the Chinese leaders during his four-day visit which ended on Tuesday, has said that he was told by the Chinese leaders that the reactors would be built under international obligations and added that India will “wait and see” how Beijing goes about it.

Colors'nFlavors Deal with China on nuclear reactors inked in 2009: Pak

============

Pretty much a done deal then. Along with the announcements by CATIC, the Pakistani budget had specific allocations for the CHASNUPP III and IV.

Will merge this with the other thread in a bit.

 

[ghazi52]

Why the attention on Pakistan's Chashma nuclear complex?



BEIJING: Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari visits China from Tuesday, following mounting signs that Chinese companies are moving ahead with plans to build two reactors at the Chashma nuclear complex in Punjab province.

Here is an explanation about those plans and why some other governments are concerned.

WHAT IS THE CHASHMA COMPLEX?

Chashma in Pakistan's Punjab province is the site of a nuclear power complex built using Chinese expertise and designs. One 300 megawatt pressurized water reactor began commercial operation in 2000, and Chinese companies are building another one likely to be finished in 2011 or 2012.

Chinese nuclear companies have also unveiled plans to build another two bigger reactors at Chashma in coming years. They have not issued detailed information about when they will start, but contracts have been signed and financing is being secured.

WHY IS CHINA HELPING BUILD MORE REACTORS THERE?

Converging foreign policy and commercial motives appear to be driving China's decision.

Pakistan is a long-standing partner of China, and Beijing believes it is important to back Pakistan to counter Indian regional dominance. It is also wary of growing US sway across South Asia.

Pakistan faces increasing power shortages, and demand is likely to keep growing quickly as the country's population expands.

There's also a commercial pull, said Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Chinese nuclear companies want to win foreign markets, and for now Pakistan is virtually the only “springboard” they have to hone their skills abroad and nurture the expertise that they hope will later find customers in other parts of the world.

ARE THERE NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION RISKS?

In theory, Pakistan could at some later date take spent fuel from Chashma to reprocess for plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons.

In practice, however, the International Atomic Energy Agency keeps safeguards at Chashma to prevent that happening, said Hibbs. China would keep control of the spent fuel to ensure it is not at risk of diversion to weapons programmes, he said.

“There would be no connection between the fuel and reactors provided by China and Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme,” he said.


SO WHAT ARE OTHER GOVERNMENTS WORRIED ABOUT?

Some of the worry is about Pakistan, and some is about the integrity of nuclear non-proliferation rules. There are those, including many commentators in India, who say Pakistan is so dogged by instability and militant pressures that it should not receive nuclear technology, which could be the target of attacks.

Also, leading Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan was an important illicit broker of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, and critics say that is another reason to worry.

The more broadly shared worry is that, however safe Chashma may be, expanding the nuclear complex there could be a fresh blow to the integrity of nuclear non-proliferation rules.

Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, and both countries refuse to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would oblige them to scrap those weapons.

The NPT rules say that if countries not authorised to possess nuclear weapons want to receive nuclear materials from countries adhering to the Treaty, they should accept comprehensive safeguard agreements for their nuclear activities.

WHAT CAN THEY DO?

For now, the main arena for addressing this issue is the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a 46-member body that seeks to ensure nuclear exports are not diverted to non-peaceful purposes.

To receive nuclear exports, nations that are not one of the five officially recognised atomic weapons states must usually place all their nuclear activities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, say NSG rules.

When the United States sealed its nuclear agreement with India in 2008, it won a waiver from that rule from the NSG after contentious negotiations. Washington and other governments have said China should at least seek a similar exemption for the planned reactors in Pakistan.

But there is little likelihood of all 46 member governments of the NSG voting in favour of a waiver, and this is a group that operates by consensus, said Hibbs.


Monday, 05 Jul, 2010
DAWN.COM | World | Why the attention on Pakistan's Chashma nuclear complex?

 

[muhammad asim aslam]

america darta hai PAK AND CHINA FRIENDSHIP SE

 

[Hafizzz]

What about American nuke deal with India. In principle America is preping indians for its upcoming Sino-US conflict and would like to curb any Sino influence in its infancy. Americans lots the war at korea and vietnam in the hands of Chinese trained gurellias and defeat always calls for a comeback. The sad factor is that Indian will not be able to strategically compete with China and may drain its own economy in fancy to do so. Even recent US arms sales to Taiwan is part of same Chain. Curbing the dragon. US sucessfully contained Russia by pawning Pakistan as its proxy and will not hesitate to do so with China.

USA is wasting her time and money with India....all the Nuke tech and weapon tech that is being offered to India by Uncle SAM will be used against USA in the future when
India betrays the Americans. The Americans in the meantime is handing the Indians a rope to hang Americans in the future.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

USA is wasting her time and money with India....all the Nuke tech and weapon tech that is being offered to India by Uncle SAM will be used against USA in the future when
India betrays the Americans. The Americans in the meantime is handing the Indians a rope to hang Americans in the future.

I agree.

 

[GUNNER]

China outflanks US in Pakistan

By Evan Hill

Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, has concluded his fifth visit to China since he came to power in 2008.

Amid much mutual backslapping and loud calls from the Pakistani president for more Chinese investment in his country's ravenous energy sector, Zardari and Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, have stayed almost silent on the biggest of their shared concerns.

Neither side was expected to trumpet their blockbuster civilian nuclear agreement, which could knock another hole in the developing world's non-proliferation regime and lead Islamabad farther down the road away from Washington and towards Beijing.

The deal for China to design, build and finance two new nuclear reactors at an estimated cost of nearly $2bn has been out in the open for more than a year, but it is technically forbidden under international rules.

Competing power

The US has offered only tame objections to the agreement, even though it sees a key ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban moving closer to a competing world power.

"Five to six years from now, I think China-Pakistan relations will definitely outweigh US-Pakistan relations, especially because China is willing to invest in sectors outside the military," Rohit Honawar, a Pakistan analyst for the Mumbai-based Strategic Foresight Group, said.

Although many details have yet to emerge from last week's high-level meetings, the state-owned Associated Press of Pakistan reportedthat China's Three Gorges Dam Corporation has agreed to invest more than $100bn in hydro-electric projects in Pakistan.

Zardari has met dozens of corporate leaders from China's petroleum, aeronautic, banking and other sectors.

"Relationships between Pakistan and the US are definitely strong because of the war on terror," Honawar said.

"But what really matters are the ground perceptions of what people in Pakistan have of the US, and that at the moment is not in the US's favour."

'All-weather friend'

The Pakistani media has played up Zardari's visit to China, and public awareness of the six-day trip to Islamabad's "all-weather friend" is "phenomenal", he said.

Meanwhile, only 17 per cent of Pakistanis recently surveyed by the Pew Research Centersaid they had a favourable view of the US.
Washington is hamstrung for a number of reasons when it comes to the impending nuclear deal, observers say.

Foremost is the unprecedented civilian nuclear pact the US made with India in 2005, which flew in the face of much of the previous international consensus and was viewed by many non-proliferation experts as a heavy blow to efforts to control the spread of nuclear technology.

Mark Fitzpatrick, a London-based nuclear policy expert with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the India deal "set a bad precedent".

Finally signed in 2008, the agreement required the US and India to negotiate an exemption from embargoes imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), an international organisation that represents virtually all of the world's nuclear powers.

It also needed an unprecedented safeguards agreement from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog.

Voluntary rules

India and Pakistan, which both possess nuclear weapons, are the only countries, aside from Israel, that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and Pakistan warned prophetically in 2008 that the India-US deal would set a precedent for them.

The NSG rules prohibiting the sale of civilian nuclear technology to non-NPT states are voluntary, and there is no legal mechanism to punish countries that violate them.

"If China chooses to ignore them, there's not a whole lot that can be done," Fitzpatrick, a former US diplomat, said.

"The United States and other countries could apply diplomatic pressure ... [but] they may not be as vigorous in applying that pressure as would have been the case had the United States not committed the first sin of exempting India."

China has also worked with the US to contain Iran and North Korea's nuclear programmes, most recently voting in favour of a new round of UN Security Council sanctions against Tehran, a diplomatic coup for Washington.

Fitzpatrick, while allowing that there was no explicit evidence to support the theory, said some observers believe that China's assistance on Iran and North Korea was the basis of an "implicit quid pro quo" whereby the US would not seriously oppose Beijing's deal with Pakistan.

Indeed, the most recent reaction from the US state department was decidedly lukewarm.

P.J. Crowley, the department's spokesman, said in June that China needed to "clarify the details"of the deal and that it would require an exemption from the NSG similar to India's.

Time-consuming path

But analysts do not believe China is inclined to follow the same time-consuming US path before working with Pakistan - three years passed between a George Bush-Manmohan Singh news conference and the implementation of the India deal.

Pakistan's close relationship with China dates back decades, and Beijing has been largely responsible for the design, manufacture, financing and supply of Islamabad's nuclear infrastructure.

China helped build Pakistan's only two modern reactors, Chashma 1 and Chashma 2, located in the populous eastern province of Punjab.
In 2004, China joined the NSG, putting itself under the rules that forbid the sale and export of nuclear technology to Pakistan. But Beijing has argued that the new deal to build and supply Chashma 3 and 4 is consistent with the agreement for the first two and can be "grandfathered" into international acceptance.

"There is little appetite in Beijing for going through the sort of process that the United States undertook," Andrew Small, a China specialist with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

"[T]here has been no attempt on China's part to secure an international consensus behind [the deal], nor to extract any concessions from Pakistan vis-a-vis proliferation issues."

Stewardship troubles

The US is highly unlikely to play any role in Pakistan's nuclear power industry for the foreseeable future, in no small part due to concerns over Pakistan's record of poor nuclear stewardship.

Foremost were the dealings of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani government's nuclear programme, who confessed in 2004 to running a clandestine proliferation ring and supplying Iran, Libya and North Korea with nuclear weapons technology and expertise.

Two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists also travelled to Afghanistanin August 2001 to provide Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, with advice on how to make nuclear weapons, according to media reports.

That history effectively blocks the US from having a hand in Pakistan's nuclear energy infrastructure, despite efforts to bolster ties between the two countries, including the multi-year, multi-billion dollar non-military aid bill signed into law in October.

It also opens the door to China, which has proven willing to deal with governments and in sectors the West finds more troublesome.

"It's impossible for the United States to be promoting civil nuclear energy co-operation with Pakistan the way China is, given the US leadership in the global non-proliferation regime and the concerns about the way that Pakistan's nuclear secrets were allowed to be sold for private gain to some of the world’s most dangerous regimes," Fitzpatrick said.

China's eagerness to proceed with the deal alarms non-proliferation experts like Fitzpatrick, who called Pakistan the "bete noire of the nuclear non-proliferation regime".

Moving forward will "clearly diminish" China's non-proliferation credentials, Peter Crail, a research analyst with the Washington DC-based Arms Control Association, said.

But Crail and Fitzpatrick, along with some Pakistani analysts, said they think it is a stretch to conclude that the nuclear deal is an indication of a developing rivalry between two powerful unions - India and the US versus Pakistan and China - even if relations between Islamabad and Beijing are rosy.

"China is Pakistan's largest defence equipment supplier. It is carrying out several projects in Pakistan. China and Pakistan are connected by the Karakorum Highway," Kamal Matinuddin, a retired Pakistani ambassador and army general, said.

"[The] Pakistani people consider China as an all weather friend unlike the USA."

Road to Kabul

But the US will not lose its influence in Pakistan, Matinuddin said.

"The road to Kabul leads through Islamabad, Obama knows that."

Jamshed Ayaz Khan, a retired Pakistani general and former president of the Institute of Regional Studies, said that Pakistan is well-placed in geo-strategic terms and would be "a fool" to look in the "wrong direction".

He said he believes that the relationship between Pakistan and the US will improve when the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan.

Even as the US draws down its military presence next door, it is unlikely to simply pack up and leave, Fitzpatrick said.

"Given Pakistan's standing and size and role in the Islamic world, the United States needs to remain engaged in Pakistan and not let this kind of an axis [with China] form," he said.

That could be difficult, given China's rising influence in the region, growing economy, and strong desire to influence events in Pakistan.

Beijing in particular would like its neighbour to serve as a future energy route, according to Anatol Lieven, a professor at King's College in London and senior research fellow at the New America Foundation.

"China is very worried that its growing economy is far too dependent on sea-borne energy routes ... and that in any future conflict the Indian navy would find it very easy to block those sea routes," he said in an interview with Russia Today.

"China has been looking at a variety of different overland routes for energy from the Persian Gulf to flow to China, and one of those possibilities, actually it's becoming a reality, is to build an oil and gas pipeline across Pakistan, along the line of the existing Karakorum Highway across the Himalayas."

As China pushes the nuclear deal forward this summer, the prevailing wisdom is that the US will struggle to counterbalance its influence and Beijing will have its way.

Honawar said: "No-one wants to confront China."

 

[Devil Soul]

US to vote against Sino-Pak nuclear deal at NSG
PTI, Jul 23, 2010
WASHINGTON: The US has said it would vote against an exemption for China to sell two civil nuclear reactors to Pakistan at the Nuclear Suppliers Group meeting, in a new move to step up pressure to get the controversial deal annulled.

Making it clear that the US would oppose the recent decision of China to sell two nuclear reactors to Pakistan, a top Obama administration official told lawmakers that Washington would vote against the Sino-Pak deal when it comes before the Nuclear Suppliers Group.

This is for the first time that such a clear statement has emerged from the Obama Administration, days after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Pakistan that US would work with it on civil nuclear energy, during her just concluded Islamabad visit.

"Yes sir, by definition, we do not support any activity that goes against the guidelines," said Vann H Van Diepen, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non Proliferation, in response to a question from Congressman Ed Royce, at a Congressional hearing convened by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Royce, who is co-chair of House India Caucus, had questions about the administration's stand on the Sino-Pak nuclear deal.

The State Department official said the US would vote against any exemption for China to sell two civil nuclear reactors to Pakistan. The NSG runs by consensus, but its decisions have no legal binding on its members.

When the issue came up before the NSG at its meeting last month in New Zealand, the US had sought more information from Beijing on this issue.

"Based on the facts we are aware of, it would occur to us that this sale would not be allowed to occur without an exemption of the NSG," Diepen said.

Early this week, Clinton had told a group of Pakistani journalists that the US would work with Pakistan on civil nuclear energy.

"In our dialogue with the Pakistani Government, we have clearly said we will work with them on civil nuclear energy," Clinton told a group of Pakistani journalists in Islamabad on July 19.

Pakistan has been demanding a civilian nuclear deal with the US on the lines of that with India.

China has already promised it two additional nuclear reactors, on which the US has sought additional clarifications at the recently held meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
US to vote against Sino-Pak nuclear deal at NSG - US - World - The Times of India

 

[Imran Khan]

hmmmmmmmmmm bili thely se bahir a gai

if there will be a man in pakistan today he reply no more nato route and WOT by pakistan from today . and yes go to hell aid and f-16

 

[Spring Onion]

Lets see. These had been finalised before China joined NSG.

 

[friendly_troll96]

hmmmmmmmmmm bili thely se bahir a gai

kon c billi kon se thelay se bahr a gai hy?

 

[Socialist]

US will of course VETO it but the question is will China pass it through NSG .I doubt it.The deal is going silently and you can already see pics of nuclear reactor preparation on Google Earth.

 

[Imran Khan]

kon c billi kon se thelay se bahr a gai hy?

man USA try whole best to sold CNT to india when we ask from them they refuse now when we got deal from china they impose us in NSG . where the hell is non nato ally now?. TRUST ON SNAKE BUT NOT USA an advise of day

 

[Imran Khan]

US will of course VETO it but the question is will China pass it through NSG .I doubt it.The deal is going silently and you can already see pics of nuclear reactor preparation on Google Earth.

can you please give me the links or google earth numbers of that place sir.

 

[Socialist]

can you please give me the links or google earth numbers of that place sir.

Go to pakdef.info/forum login and you can see the pics in Nuclear Thread posted by some member.